We wanted to develop our own and the students' language skills, learn about different cultures and gain performance experience. We wanted them to notice that young people who are into music can easily get to know each other, because music is a universal language. Both schools needed to organize a party for the school's students and staff in honor of the national anniversary. In Finland, independence is celebrated on December 6th, and in Portugal, the anniversary of the revolution is celebrated on April 25th. We wanted to increase students' knowledge of the importance of music in social turning points and in the fight against, for example, climate change. We also saw in the project an opportunity to strengthen the study motivation and self-esteem of the students participating in the project. With the project, the students of both schools get the opportunity to practice being in the audience at these two wonderful concerts and thus be part of the project. We also wanted to offer students the opportunity to play and sing with other young people and gain performance experience. We hope this will affect the operating culture of our school, so that more students would dare to participate in the school's various events.
The applicants already got to know each other in previous Erasmus+ projects and we soon realized that we wanted to continue working together specifically in music. We also wanted to put the students at the center of the activity. Especially for many young Portuguese from poor families, traveling abroad is otherwise not possible. We applied for this project because we wanted to offer our students a chance to travel to another country where they can get to know young musicians their own age, get to know different cultures, develop their language skills and get performance experience. In an earlier project, we noticed that Portuguese fado music was also popular among young people, and we started thinking about what could be the Finnish counterpart to fado music. We wanted to explore this topic more with our Finnish students.